What Goes Through Your Guts Actually Influences Your Emotions

Yes, You Act Like What You Eat

Why Is This Important?

Because if there’s one reason to start paying attention to our diets, it’s probably the idea that belly bacteria could be making us insane.

Long Story Short

New research ascertains that there are a few unusual links between what’s going on in your guts and what’s up in your brain.

Long Story

“You are what you eat,” the saying goes. Until circa right now, it was popularly thought to refer to the fact no one can get away with a Chad Kroeger-esque diet of 12 chicken strips and a Caesar salad every day and stay lean enough to evade police. Now, thanks to a new study from the University of California, it seems that your fragile little emotions are also at the mercy of what goes over the lips and past the gums.

The researchers went through a lot of shit to come to these conclusions. After pootifully collecting fecal matter from 40 different women, the team profiled the content of the respondents’ respective ‘gut microbiome’ (the bacteria living all throughout our digestive systems).

Being that previous research has shown gut microbiome can maybe influence human responses to fear and does seem to trigger anxiety in rodents, the next logical step was to hook these 40 women up to MRI scanners and show them a rotunda of emotionally provocative images after sifting through their shit.

Two different groups of bacteria appeared to affect the respondents in contrasting ways. The Prevotella were found most consistently among only seven of the women, and their brains showed much greater--and unregulated--emotional and sensory connectivity.

They all responded the most strongly with distress and anxiety when shown more ‘negative’ images. The second group of emotional space invaders--actually scientifically termed ‘the Bacteroids’--were more prevalent in the remaining 33 women. Their emotional responses were much more rigid and controlled than the first group, and they all exhibited lots of activity in the parts of the brain responsible for problem solving and general smart person stuff. They were also a lot less likely to freak out over any of the negative imagery being shown.